One Ultra1 and about a dozen classics (sun4m). Used to have some SS5s too.

Sparcs own in context switching, they are remarkable under load. If only they were cheap.

been running linux since the 1.1.41 days, sparcs for about half as long._________________Being a Gentoo user means living in a house inhabited by a family of crazed carpenters. When you wake up, the house is different. Maybe there is a new turret, or some walls have moved, or perhaps someone has removed the floor under your bed.

I've noticed your thread, and I find it interresting. Sparcs are a bit exotic to me and would be nice to try out

Maybe you people could give me an idea what to expect from a rather old Sun Sparc when it comes to performance. I have the possibilty to buy old ones from my school really cheap. Don't know what models or anything, just know that the CPU is running at perhaps 150MHz +/- 30MHz, and that they most likely have been running as terminals for the students (which means: no monster machines for sure), but as I said I have no idea what this could be equivalent to in the x86-world._________________Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
--Richard Feynman

I've noticed your thread, and I find it interresting. Sparcs are a bit exotic to me and would be nice to try out

Maybe you people could give me an idea what to expect from a rather old Sun Sparc when it comes to performance. I have the possibilty to buy old ones from my school really cheap. Don't know what models or anything, just know that the CPU is running at perhaps 150MHz +/- 30MHz, and that they most likely have been running as terminals for the students (which means: no monster machines for sure), but as I said I have no idea what this could be equivalent to in the x86-world.

In my experience, the clock speeds on sun processors may be physically equivalent, but the underlying Sun architecture seems to make up for quite a bit in efficiency. My lowly sparcstation5 (old sparc architecture) is a real slug for compiling things, but it doesn't do much else than route and filter traffic, so its nowhere near capacity. The Netra T105 at 360Mhz (ultrasparcIII architecture) screams! I'd compare it to systems more than twice as fast on x86!

sundrop: ss5 75MHz, not enough memory, massively overkill 9GByte IBM scsiIII 15krpm hdd that I had lying around. Stage1, xfree86, fluxbox and kde. Not because I use bloatware like kde, mind (box is headless), I just did it to see how long it would take (less than two months to compile!). OOo is still emerging...

You can get it to work, yes. Drop by #gentoo-sparc on freenode and speak to myself (ciaranm) or bazik. You may have to screw around a bit to get it working... Or you may have one of those chipsets that just doesn't work at all...

Don't forget to give bazik the details of the card so that he can update the PCI list

I've got an Ultra 10 / 333MHz, 512MB RAM, 2x 9GB IDE drives. I got tired of running Solaris on it, since I'm a solaris admin at work. Its currently serving web, dns, mail, etc, from my dsl connection at home. The gentoo install went so smoothly, I'm considering getting an Ultra 60 for use as a development workstation. Dual procs, a gig of ram, and a couple of 18gig scsi drives . . .

Just installed a 333 Mhz CPU in my Ultra 5 which had a 360 in it. Seems that the extra cache really makes a difference. Maybe I am just crazy. Also added a 52x24x25 cd-rw to the system. Still playing around with it, but wrote my first backup successfully. Things are looking up now!

I had mixed results with FreeBSD and other Linux distros on a Sun Ultra1 w/ 1GB RAM and 9GB Disk w/o video. Gentoo installed very easily via serial console EXCEPT for nano. In other words, booted it from CD and started network and SSH first thing. Oh, BTW, there's just a slight bug with the network driver. It does get fixed after you download the latest sources.